Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 24)

Integration with video players

Following up on last week’s efforts on the video players integration front, Kodi remained our core focus. With a LibreELEC setup in place, it was possible to start tackling VAAPI integration. This was not such a straightforward task, since various assumptions were in place. For instance, it was assumed that VAAPI support was only relevant for x86 platforms and it seems pretty clear that VAAPI integration in general was done with x86 in mind. This is particularly illustrated by the fact that the VAAPI video rendering pipeline relies on the GPU for all transformations and composition. This is a typical setup for x86, as the use of planes on these platforms was progressively replaced by a GPU-centric approach. Since our goal with Kodi is to use DRM/KMS planes in place of the GPU, this did not fit well. Moreover, the GPU import format required for dma-buf is simply not supported by the Mali blob (as we found out some weeks ago when working with VLC and the GLES untiler) and this is the only setup that Kodi currently supports for VAAPI.

There is still definitely hope, as Kodi supports a DRM Prime renderer that uses DRM/KMS planes in place of the GPU but does not support VAAPI in its current form. More specifically, it uses ffmpeg to get a dma-buf handle (through the AV_PIX_FMT_DRM_PRIME format from ffmpeg), that is not available as-is. In order to get this sort of pipeline with VAAPI, multiple steps have to be taken. A hardware acceleration context has to be brought up to select the VAAPI acceleration method instead of regular software decoding. This exposes the AV_PIX_FMT_VAAPI format from ffmpeg, which is still not good to feed the Kodi DRM Prime renderer. This has to be converted to AV_PIX_FMT_DRM_PRIME using ffmpeg helpers. As a result, some plumbing is required in Kodi and this work is still work in progress at the moment.

In parallel to the work on players, our Sunxi-Cedrus VPU driver was rebased on top of the latest version of the media request API from Hans Verkuil. It was the occasion to spot various bugs in this latest iteration, that were rapidly tackled thanks to Hans’ availability. The required follow-up patches were posted on the request API branch and will be part of its next revision. Regarding our driver itself, a great number of comments from our previous patchset were taken into account and integrated. We now have another iteration of the series ready, that we will publish soon. The tasks list for the driver itself keeps shrinking and we are getting closer and closer to the point where the driver is ready to be merged!

H264 support

On the H264 front, good progress has been made this week too. Early this week, we’ve been able to play a baseline profile video without any particular quirks anymore. Some time was thus spent on cleaning up and refactoring the driver, libva-dump and cedrus-frame-test tools in order to support both the MPEG2 and H264 codecs, a feature that was dropped due to many hacks during the development. We then took the occasion to start the discussion on the linux-media mailing list by sending a preliminary version of the patches. We then worked on the real libva-cedrus, adding the support for H264. Most of the code is there now, but unfortunately isn’t functional yet. Some debugging will be on the agenda next week 🙂